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“... and dictated defence policy long before he became premier. The entire National Government, Herbert Samuel observed, was ‘run by Neville Chamberlain. What he says goes.’ This was especially true during the abdication crisis. Chamberlain, a model of outraged provincial respectability, decided that Wallis Simpson was an absolute baggage, ‘a thoroughly ...”

“... The career of the Georgian comedian Samuel Foote is a chequered story of twists and scrapes, setbacks and rebounds, but its ending is bleak, and out of apparently lightweight materials there emerges a sort of tragedy. In theatrical lore the most famous of his setbacks was the amputation of a leg (probably his left) after a riding accident ...”

“... were already well-advanced. ‘In splendid companies Scotch is not much heard,’ reported Samuel Johnson in Edinburgh, on his way to the Western Isles. By 1844, according to Cockburn, ‘the fashion of the Ayr world hath passed away.’ Ayr, the unsurpassable, had been surpassed. The new era of swift communications, of railways, industry and ...”

“... starting with a recognition of every accused person’s right to speak through an advocate. Samuel Johnson gave this wings: ‘As it rarely happens,’ he said to Boswell, ‘that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of ...”

“... Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century:Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme ...”

“... today.PreviousNextIn 1954, the sculptor Phyllis Lambert was living in Paris when her father, Samuel Bronfman, sent her pictures of the 34-storey skyscraper he planned to build on Park Avenue in New York. Bronfman, the Canadian ‘whisky king’ who owned Seagram distillers, had commissioned Pereira & Luckman to create a gleaming metal and glass edifice ...”

“... is even a case to be made for Giles Gordon being the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s ...”

“... with Matthews), without often being read or assessed as literature. Books such as Boswell’s Johnson and Macaulay’s History once gave rise to the same apparent category error, but they have long since received the full hermeneutic treatment. So far Pepys has survived intact, greater in the public imagination than his own words. The fulfilment of this ...”

“... frugal stonemason descended of a family known for its ‘hard sayings, and hard strikings’, as a Samuel Johnson of the Scottish peasantry, a man with ‘perhaps the largest natural endowment’ of any man he ever knew. Froude reports that the way he talked of ‘the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses’, turned his son into a ...”

“... who are illogical, shrewd and kind, and nothing surprises them. Their natural kindness is what Samuel Johnson said all social goodness really is, palliative rather than radical – and in that a striking contrast to the radical, root-and-branch pain of Leontes. They do not interfere with a universe felt to be dangerously capable of looking after ...”

“... words ‘vulgar’ and ‘barbarous’. Garrick was still arousing gasps of awe as the prince, and Samuel Johnson loved the play. But neoclassical principles generally demand clear form and order, and a self-evident morality, and these are choices that Hamlet has always been able to frustrate or violate. This restricted sense of the civilised re-emerged ...”

“... journalists and printers were often the same people. It was the age of Grub Street, of Boswell and Johnson, coffee houses, clay pipes and gallons of port. In 1812 Murray II moved the firm to Albemarle Street in the more respectable West End, where it remained until the seventh John Murray sold up in 2002. Here Murray’s built a list that included some of the ...”

“... the first time that these arguments have been put forward. One notable predecessor is the American Samuel Eliot Morison, who does not figure in Grigg’s bibliography, but who delivered lectures at Oxford, and wrote in the New York Times Book Review, during 1957, in a way which foreshadowed many of the arguments in the present book. The debates about the ...”

“... the main hall of a primary school in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The pastor, Prince Yormie Johnson, became a celebrity of sorts in the early 1990s when he filmed his execution of the country’s president in the first months of what would turn out to be a brutal 14-year civil war. He has since found Jesus: ‘I am the servant of God whom He took from ...”

“... B.S. Johnson died by his own hand in 1973. He was 40, and the author of seven novels, all of them rather odd in ways that put publishers off because their oddities made them expensive to produce and hard to sell. He bullied the publishers haughtily and often got his way, though at some cost to himself: the books were hard to sell ...”